by David Weber
His smile faded as he climbed into the air car and closed the hatch. The environmental systems came on, keeping the interior pleasantly cool, but he sat for several minutes, fingers drumming on the controls, while he pondered.
The traps he’d prepared had worked well, so far. In fact, he’d actually had to make fairly few modifications to a design he’d used several times in the past. He’d had to reprogram their chameleonlike “smart paint,” but it hadn’t been difficult to create an almost perfect camouflage, well suited to Sphinx’s vegetation. Until they actually pounced, they were only small, compactly folded shapes, virtually impossible to see at any distance above a meter even if someone knew exactly what to look for.
On top of the camouflage, he’d chosen his sites very carefully. He’d used small remote platforms—the kind routinely used by surveyors and prospectors—to get a good look at the terrain within several kilometers of the GPS coordinates his transponder had given him. Getting them in under that kind of tree cover had been tricky, and he’d lost two of them, apparently to collisions with picketwood branches. He’d been afraid the treecats might hear them and be panicked into fleeing the area, but there’d been no sign of any such response. Just in case, though, he’d waited a full local week and a half after sending in the platforms before going anywhere near the treecats again.
The time hadn’t been wasted. With the imagery from the agile platforms—especially the thermal imagery—he’d been able to identify the picketwood pathways the treecats used most heavily, then search for specific side branches, hollow trunks, and other natural hiding places near those pathways. He’d had exacting criteria for the spots he’d wanted, and only after he was satisfied he’d found them had he taken his traps out one night and put them into place.
His low-light vision contacts had made it daylight-bright, even under the enormously deep leaf canopy of the picketwood and crown oaks, and he’d worn a hostile environment suit. It had been heavy and clumsy, but it was a very special suit which had been treated to kill all external scent, and its sealed environment prevented him from leaving any scent of his own. The traps had been treated with the same scent-killing compound, and he’d baited each of them with celery juice.
He’d been careful not to use too much. The idea was to use just enough to send the tempting scent wafting out to where a treecat who passed within no more than a meter or two, possibly three, might detect it. Bolgeo wanted them close enough to smell it and go to investigate—make sure of what they were actually smelling—and walk into the trap before it occurred to them to call any of their friends to join them.
The Forestry Service footage of the BioNeering incident’s survivors suggested that treecats normally went about their routine tasks as individuals, not in pairs or groups. Perhaps because a race of telepaths had no need to remain in close physical proximity to communicate with one another? He didn’t know about that, but it had meant it was unlikely another treecat would be within visual range at the instant one of them walked into one of his traps. He’d placed those traps far enough from the treecats’ nests that (hopefully, at least) they would have had to do the telepathic equivalent of shouting loudly to be heard by anyone beyond visual range, as well. Unfortunately, he couldn’t be positive of the distance at which they could make another of their own kind “hear” them, so he couldn’t be positive he’d succeeded in that. But he could at least try to keep the traps far enough out that no one would simply “overhear” their thoughts when they detected the delectable scent of celery.
Once they came close enough, the proximity sensors built into the traps released a powerful, targeted spurt of gas. Bolgeo had tested the gas (carefully and very privately) on several types of Sphinxian wildlife first and lost quite a few test subjects in the process. In the end, though, he’d found one which knocked a treecat out almost instantly with no observable ill effects. And once the little creature had been rendered unconscious, the trap disconnected itself from the tree branch or the trunk or the interior of the hollow space to which it had been attached. It extruded mechanical legs, walked across to the sleeping treecat, and unfolded itself until it could very carefully and gently reconfigure into a cage around its captive. Then it sent out a coded radio pulse to announce it had fulfilled its mission and waited—monitoring the treecat and administering more of the gas whenever it showed signs of awakening—until it could be collected.
So far, the system seemed to be working fine. The unconscious treecats obviously weren’t managing to call out for rescue, and Bolgeo or one of his assistants could collect the occupied traps with a simple air car trip. All they had to do was fly over the area where the trap lay waiting and trigger its counter-grav unit. The unit’s endurance was no more than five minutes, but that was ample for it to rise above the canopy and for an air car pilot to put his vehicle into a hover, open a window, and collect the trap (and its contents) with a simple hand-held tractor beam like the ones used in any warehouse. Getting a trap back into place and reset was more complicated, requiring another nocturnal visit in the environmental suit, but even that was hardly an onerous task.
Except for the fact that he had yet to capture a single female, Bolgeo thought. There ought to be a way he could—
His thoughts broke off as his uni-link gave a soft, musical chime. Most people would have assumed it indicated someone had left him a voicemail, or possibly a text message. Most people, however, would have been wrong, and Bolgeo smiled at the confirmation that another of his traps had just collected its own treecat for him.
He entered a code, checking the tally, and frowned thoughtfully. That made three since the last collection flight the night before. Given the traps’ locations and the weather, it was unlikely any of the captives were going to suffer from dehydration or starvation before they were collected. But the greater the number of traps sitting around with slumbering treecats, the greater the chance that an un-trapped treecat might happen along and spot one of them. And while he didn’t like collecting them in daylight, he wouldn’t have to land, anyway.
He thought about it for another several seconds, then shrugged. He didn’t have anyplace he was scheduled to be, so he might as well fly over and collect them now. If he needed to land for any reason the environmental suit was ready and waiting in his air car’s outsized cargo compartment, and so was the trank rifle. He didn’t want to use it if he could avoid it, but the rifle’s darts had an effective range of almost three hundred meters. They were guaranteed to knock out any treecat, and Tennessee Bolgeo was an excellent shot. Besides, who knew? He wasn’t planning on using the trank rifle, but if it should happen he had to land and he happened to see one of those dappled brown-and-white coats, he wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to finally collect a female treecat.
* * *
“I don’t understand what’s wrong,” Stephanie said, sitting on the picketwood branch fourteen meters above the ground, feet dangling in empty air. The slender, dappled treecat standing in her lap and staring intently into her eyes gave an audible “whuffle” of obvious frustration, and Stephanie stroked the delicate creature’s silken pelt.
“I’m sorry, Morgana,” she said humbly, projecting her regret as strongly as she could, “and I’m really trying. But I just don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
Sings Truly said, turning to look at her brother.
Climbs Quickly replied,
Sings Truly grumbled.
The mental shout was actually all a single thought, but Sings Truly and Climbs Quickly snapped upright, heads swiveling automatically in the direction from which it had come.
It was obvious to Climbs Quickly that only a memory singer or a mated female could have projected her shout across the distance this one had clearly covered. And even as he thought that, he recognized the taste of Water Dancer, Twig Weaver’s mate. But what was she doing that far from the central nest place? And what could have happened to Twig Weaver?
Sings Truly said, clearly sensing his inner thoughts.
* * *
Stephanie had no idea what was going on.
One moment, the female treecat she’d christened “Morgana”—the one she suspected might well be Lionheart’s sister—had been staring into her eyes, almost vibrating with the intensity of her effort to make Stephanie understand whatever was of such concern to all the treecats. The next, Morgana and Lionheart had whipped around to stare at one another. And then, abruptly, Morgana leapt out of Stephanie’s lap to crouch on the limb beside her.
“What is it? What’s happening?” Stephanie asked sharply, looking back and forth between the two treecats.
They paid her absolutely no attention for several seconds. Not rudely, but because they were so obviously concentrating on something else. Then Lionheart looked back up at her, his huge green eyes as dark and almost . . . pleading as she had ever seen them. His remaining true-hand reached out and the slender, wiry fingers closed warmly around the little finger of her own right hand and tugged.
“Bleek,” he said urgently. “Bleek!”
She looked down at him, trying to understand, and two more true-hands closed on the thumb and index finger of her left hand.
“Bleek!” Morgana seconded Lionheart. “Bleek! Bleek!”
They were both tugging her in the same direction, and she looked back and forth between them a moment longer, then nodded.
“All right, I’m coming!” she told them and activated her belt counter-grav unit and slid off the branch upon which she’d been sitting.
* * *
Climbs Quickly and Sings Clearly had become accustomed to the two-legs’ marvelous tools, including the one which allowed Death Fang’s Bane to apparently fly. They’d realized some time ago that the humming device on the two-leg youngling’s belt didn’t actually let her fly, since she seemed unable to move swiftly or control her direction without her personal flying thing, but it did allow her to float to the highest of branches. And because they realized that they were unsurprised when she pushed off the limb and started drifting gradually towards the ground so far below. Instead of panicking, they simply wrapped their arms and mid-limbs around her forearms and floated down with her.
Under most circumstances, both of them would have been bleeking madly in delight. Indeed, Death Fang’s Bane sometimes gave armloads of kittens similar flights, and the entire clan enjoyed them immensely. This time, however, they were too worried—too well aware of Water Dancer’s distant distress and the rising anxiety level of the rest of Bright Water’s adults.
Sings Truly stiffened angrily, but her brother quickly touched her on one shoulder. She looked at him, and he twitched his ears, his mind-glow radiating mingled understanding, sympathy, and amusement.
Broken Tooth said.
she said ominously, and he bleeked a half-laugh.
26
Stephanie hurried through the forest, surrounded and accompanied by a flowing tide of gray and cream-colored treecats. She was half-tempted to use her counter-grav to join them on the picketwood branches along which they flowed, but treecats could fit through spaces and squirm around obstacles even a relatively small, frustratingly flat-chested fourteen-year-old human would have found impassable.
The forest floor was considerably more than ankle-deep in dead leaves and leaf mold, but it was clear of undergrowth, thanks to how little sunlight managed to penetrate the towering tree canopy, so the going was relatively easy. And at least, unlike most human interlopers into the Sphinxian bush, she didn’t have to worry about things like hexapumas. Not with an entire clan of treecats filtering through the trees above her! Of course . . .
She paused for a moment to catch her breath and reached down, almost reflexively to pat the handgun at her hip. So far, she’d never even come close to needing that gun, and the truth was that she didn’t expect to, not with the treecats to keep an eye on her. If she did run into another hexapuma, though, at least she might not have to get close enough to stick it with a vibro blade!
She grinned at the thought and, having caught her breath again, went jogging off with the treecats once more.
* * *
Although Climbs Quickly was only a male, his mind-voice had grown so much stronger since his bonding to Death Fang
’s Bane that Water Dancer heard him easily.
Climbs Quickly turned, looking in the indicated direction, and spotted a small, distant brown and white shape on the high branch of a golden-leaf above what a human would have called a near-pine. Water Dancer was slender and delicate, even for a female, and normally presented a picture of gracefulness. Now, though, she was tense, frightened. Even without tasting her mind-glow, Climbs Quickly would have realized that simply from how rigidly she crouched on the branch.
Climbs Quickly looked at Broken Tooth, who stood on his right side, then at Short Tail, on the other side, and saw their tense confusion mirroring his own. Then the three of them were moving again, climbing to the topmost branch of their net-wood tree and following it to Water Dancer’s tree, then leaping across to the far taller golden-leaf and swarming quickly up to join her.
It didn’t take them long to reach her, and her anxiety and fear for her mate became steadily more obvious to them as they approached her. Then they were at her side, and she raised one slightly trembling true-hand and pointed.
Her mind-voice was almost a whimper, and Climbs Quickly felt the fur rising along his spine, felt his tighly furled tail flattening out, as his eyes followed her gesture and he saw Twig Weaver.
Water Dancer’s mate was one of Bright Water’s most skilled hunters. Indeed, he took his name from the cleverness with which he wove branches and twigs together to create hiding spots from which he might pounce upon smaller game as it wandered carelessly past. But this time it was Twig Weaver who had been entrapped within someone else’s weaving.